I Miss My Mom

Cancer took her from me, from my family and her friends, on 12/2/2011. It was a horrible several months from diagnosis through chemotherapy and then finding out chemo wasn’t working, then hospice. My mom was technically gone a month before she finally died. Yes, I phrased that way on purpose — at that point, it was a mercy. She didn’t know where she was or who we were for the last couple of weeks. Fuck cancer.

Thanksgiving was my mom’s holiday. We hosted it for as long as I can remember. It used to be my favorite day of the year — turkey is the best protein ever. Deal with it. When I was 10 or so, she added a goose dinner between Christmas and New Years. On top of all that, my parents’s anniversary was 11/24. This really was her time of year.

And then she died. And nothing’s been the same since.

I’ve been trying to write this for over a week and I don’t know how to get past this point. It’s just… nothing is right. I’ve gone away for Thanksgiving (my in-laws live in Tennessee), and I’ve gone to my family’s Thanksgiving. Both are wrong.

Christmas music — barely listen to it anymore. Barely care it’s the season. I like getting together to have some good food with family and friends from now until after New Year’s, but any “holiday” feeling is gone. Hell, my wife and I have hosted the goose dinner for several years (because my parents, in their mid to late 60s couldn’t do it any longer), but I have no “feels” for anything but the “feels” I get from any other dinner party.

I look back at those last two paragraphs and I see myself deflecting. I am not great at dealing with what are considered the more negative emotions. This is my fifth year without my mom, and there’s still a hole in me that I know will never be filled.

We lost my mom Nov 14 2011 and you’re right. It will never be the same. I’m told it gets better as time passes. I suppose it does to some degree. It doesn’t hurt as acutely, for me anyway, but I don’t think it will ever go away. I am an unapologetic momma’s boy, so it hit me pretty hard and I seriously doubt I’ll ever “get over it”. Honestly, not sure if I even want to.